[Talk-GB] Postcodes

Will Phillips wp4587 at gmail.com
Fri Nov 9 16:27:11 UTC 2018


On 09/11/2018 14:44, SK53 wrote:
> The available sets of open data which can be used to resolve postcodes 
> are: Food Hygiene (the best, easiest to resolve, coverage of the whole 
> UK - even Rutland); Companies House Open Data (surprisingly useful 
> even in areas of social housing); the National Register of Social 
> Housing (NROSH, not updated since 2011, but still very useful); CQC 
> (medical practices, care homes etc). I haven't looked to see how many 
> postcodes are covered by these in total, but it should be a reasonable 
> proportion of the total. If you aren't aware Will Phillips 
> OSM-Nottingham site does allow searching of various open data sets 
> across the UK (I would recommend searching only in the viewport, so 
> you need to zoom out and in to the target area). The quickest way to 
> ensure at least one address is mapped for a given postcode is using 
> Greg's FHRS tools.

The datasets used by OSM Nottingham currently include 1,278,680 unique 
postcodes. I've not checked how many of these are valid postcodes. 
Sources such as Companies House don't validate their addresses, so this 
total will certainly include some proportion that are incorrect.

There are 1.76 million postcodes in the UK (from Codepoint), so the open 
data covers at most 73% of the total.

Regards,
Will







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